The first day of the 30th Split Film Festival began in the morning with the opening of the New Media and AI Program exhibition at the Golden Gate Loggia. The selected exhibition can be viewed until Tuesday, the last day of the festival.
The New Media Festival program opened the day before, on Thursday (September 11), with an exhibition by multimedia artist and jury member Thomas Mohr at the Kvart Gallery. The film part of the festival officially began in the packed Karaman Cinema with a screening of the Japanese documentary Numakage Public Pool by director Shingo Oto, who addressed the audience via video message. This emotional documentary, imbued with rhythm, repetition, and a carefully selected soundtrack that carries the atmosphere of the film, deals with the topic of the closure of a public swimming pool due to urban renewal and the collective sense of loss that this act causes in the community. Using the metaphor of the swimming pool as the main character, the film interprets the five stages of collective grief in an interesting way, according to the model of psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross.
The opening ceremony in Karaman began at 9 p.m. with a screening of a documentary from the thirty-year-old STFF archive, which made the audience laugh and move as it recalled numerous important moments and statements by prominent artists and cultural workers from the local, national and international scene. After thunderous applause, the audience had the opportunity to watch an early two-minute film by former festival director Branko Karabatić titled My Life, produced by the Split Cinema Club.
In her address, Deputy Mayor Matea Dorčić emphasized the importance of the festival for the city of Split, and the new festival director Marin Renić greeted those present with visible enthusiasm for future editions of STFF. This year’s festival trailer, an original work by Darko Škrobonja and edited by Dragan Đokić, was also premiered. In line with the festival’s theme and visual identity – pigeons, whose footage was posted by citizens on the festival’s official social networks for weeks, the trailer, through the metaphor of people-pigeons, problematizes greed, indifference and a collective lack of empathy, thus continuing the tradition of socially engaged opening credits of the STFF.
The first day of the festival already showed that, despite the challenges and uncertainties surrounding its further holding, the Split audience remains loyal to non-commercial film and the festival atmosphere of the legendary STFF. STFF invites all fans of the seventh art to continue to follow the diverse festival program for the next four days, until Tuesday, September 16. Admission to all screenings is free.